Disk Drive Documents

Leaving aside some of the vitriol, Sellam, Tony and Dick have made some valid points about document format. These documents and others like them are of interest mainly to people who collect old machines; whether there are more Windows users who die every day than there are users of computer systems desiring but inherently unable to view PDF files is totally irrelevant -- the vast majority of those Windows users aren't interested in these documents. On the other hand, there are lots of people like us who use classic machines day-to-day. For example, until recently, the machine I used most often was an Acorn Archimedes. It certainly has graphics and comms capabilities, but it can't view PDF. (There is now a viewer, but it's too big, too slow, and too restricted to be useful on my Arc). Even now, I don't use Windows, and I know many other users who don't. There are several UNIX OSs out there that don't have PDF viewers, and a few that only run old versions of Acroread (there was a lot of complaining about a year ago that AIX didn't have a PDF viewer). Furthermore, I'm sure that many enthusiasts might well use the internet, say at work, to download "stuff", that then gets copied for use on a classic machine elsewhere. Finally, as far as machines are concerned, not all of them can use cheap large-capacity hard drives, so size *is* an issue. All of this suggests that Word documents are a complete non-starter, and however convenient PDF is in some ways, it shouldn't be the *only* format provided. I think we're all agreed on that? I'd also submit that PostScript is less useful than either. There are few systems that can handle PostScript but not PDF; all can handle ASCII+GIF; it can be a real pain extracting individual pages from PostScript, especially the almost-DSC-compliant PS produced by Microsloth. Even printing it can be problematic. PDF is nice because it can preserve the original layout, with diagrams in the right places etc, but for many purposes having the diagrams separate (and viewed in a separate window) is actually a nicer way of working -- depending on purpose and personal preference. For the latter scheme, there's little wrong with flat ASCII text files and some GIFs. Stream TIFF might theoretically be better suited to scanned diagrams, but isn't so well supported as GIF. As for the size of the raster image, it can be scrolled or scaled on any reasonable graphics system I've ever seen -- and that's exactly what happens anyway when a scanned image is put in a PDF file and displayed or printed. If the images are separate, anyone who wants can print one separately, blown up to the size they want (resolution permitting) and printed out separately to pin on the wall over the bench. You can't do that with Acroread. There are plenty of document formats that don't keep everything in one file. Why should that be a requirement? There are probably more systems that use directories or folders than single files. Tar/zip for distribution is fine for these. As Sellam said, you'll never get a concensus about a single format that all of the interested parties can access. I don't agree that means you should use only the lowest common denominator; I think it means you should provide two (or more) formats. I'll download the PDF if it's available[1], but I'll surely download the ASCII too. Of course, I'm assuming that one is more-or-less as easy to produce as the other, if you have the originals. [1] unless I discover that the "text" within it isn't OCRed or typed, but scanned bitmaps, in which case I'll likely throw it away again. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Dept. of Computer Science University of York